-from The Jook

The Following is a modified interview originally conducted by Patrick Millikin of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona.

PM: I came across this quote in one of your articles and it’s really stuck with me: "I like noir because it is an ambiguous form, one that suggests we’re buffeted in our lives by outside forces that we can’t control. Los Angeles is also like that. It’s a place of both promise and ruin. And those elements vie for prominence in my books." With damn near every book coming out in the crime genre being tagged "noir" it’s nice to hear somebody putting voice to what the tradition is all about. The other day I was trying to articulate to somebody why I am so attracted to the Irish temperament in literature and it occurred to me that the Irish have an almost innately noir worldview, based on centuries of oppression and just basically having the shit stomped out of them repeatedly. One could certainly draw a parallel to the black experience in this country.

GP: Yeah, I don’t think you can view the black American experience through anything but an existentialist lens. I mean, just look at what jumped off following the killing of this unarmed teenager Timmy Thomas in Cincinnati this past April. Or how the hell does a jury acquit four beefy cops, wearing bullet proof vests shooting 41 times and killing an unarmed man – Amadou Diallo -- in a vestibule in New York? In the L.A. Sheriff’s department, there used to be and some allege still are cliques of white deputies who go by the names Cavemen, Insane Whities, Vikings, and so on. A former head of the department claimed these formations were merely off-duty "clubs." But the Vikings have been successfully sued in a landmark civil rights case. So, you’re right, one can certainly draw parallels to the conditions of the felaheen throughout the world. That is, how the ruling class will always close ranks and justify its actions against the poor, the disenfranchised, the so-called minorities, in the name of order. And particularly in this country, the Diallo shooting, the wooden end of a plunger rammed up that brother’s ass (Abner Luima) by an NYPD cop, the LAPD blowing away a homeless black woman (Margaret Mitchell) ‘cause her shopping cart was a threat -- bearing in mind the head of the LAPD is an African-American -- are incidents that demonstrate how ingrained racism and institutionalized racism are in this country. The real pity is that the oppressed themselves are kept apart because of their own racism, sexism, homophobia, what have you.

PM: Your Ivan Monk novels do a remarkable job of portraying all of the teeming, apocalyptic energy of Los Angeles - and ultimately your view seems to be one of hope and possibility amidst all of the ruin. Can you talk a bit about the dynamic of Los Angeles?

GP: L.A. is such a shifting landscape, I’m hard-pressed to get my hands/mind around it. I mean, I grew up here, but there’s still plenty of areas in the county I never go to or have hardly been to. And now, as the black population of the county decreases and the Latino and Asian populations boom, I sometimes feel like a stranger in my own land. Where I grew up in South Central is now predominantly Latino, and that’s not going to reverse. But this is the future, this is the challenge to create something genuine, something of value in a social and political sense. Yet, we know this is incredibly hard work and can’t be done just ‘cause the President creates a race commission (as ex-President Bill Clinton did) to travel around the country listening to anecdotes about how fucked up the country is. But things are changing. In L.A. our recent mayor’s race was very interesting in that the two men contending for the post were liberals, one anglo, James Hahn, and the other a Latino, Antonio Villaraigosa. Hanh was bolstered because of the legacy of his deceased father, Kenneth Hanh, who as a County Supervisor, was revered in the black community. Conversely, Antonio was up front about trying to create a true multi-racial coalition of support for his candidacy and how this symbolized the future of the City.

PM: You have a real reverence for the history of Los Angeles. I love the ghosts of the city that float through your books, especially the music scene down on Central Avenue in the 30’s- 50’s. Your father was there. Did he speak often of those days and did some of the anecdotes in the books come from his experiences?

GP: My dad and his friends would talk about the "days on the ark" their journey from Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, the South, right? Because they were of that migrant generation and time who went north and west looking for work, looking for something better than the messed-up shit back home. But, of course, there was frustration too in the "promised land." My dad had a great innate mechanical ability. When he was 12 or 13, he wrapped a Model A --this is the Ford that came after the Model T --around a telephone pole in Seguin, Texas, the town he came from. He took that goddamn wreck apart and put it back together, thus teaching himself about how a car worked. So he gets out here to L.A. (after living in El Paso on the Mexican side with a Mexican woman, being an ice man in Chicago, digging trenches for the WPA, working as a lookout for a bootlegger, etc) and wants to go to a technical school. But the technical school ain’t admitting black folk... This kind of story gets amplified hundreds of times over by the men and women who came from similar circumstances. So, their recollections of Central Avenue were always --hindsight and all-- romantic, but you can see why. It was in those days the only place in town you could dress up, take your girl out, hear the greats like Ellington, Louie Armstrong, Trummy Young, Lena Horne, and so on and not worry (at least too much) about getting jacked-up by the cops. And I do put these little tidbits from those days in the Monk books. In Only The Wicked, music and the past play an important role in one of the subplots. Monk says at one point that he had an uncle who was a bartender in the bar in the basement of the Dunbar Hotel. This is a famous black hotel on Central Avenue (along with the Clark, also on Central. The Dunbar is still there and has been refurbished) where blacks, from entertainers to Pullman porters, could stay in segregated L.A. Anyway, the bar was called the Turban Room, and, in reality, my Uncle Sammy was a bartender there. There was a friend of my dad’s named Arthur Matthews. He was a blind cook, and I’m going to put a guy like him in a future book. So that stuff from my dad and mom’s past is yet to be mined for all it’s worth. In fact, I’m be doing a book for Tekno-Books that is part of a WWII series Marty Greenberg and Ed Gorman are launching. My book will deal with African-Americans during that period, and I’ll draw on some of pop’s and his brother’s experiences in the war (my other uncle, Norman, was part of that black ex-patriot crowd who stayed in France after the war) as well as look at the "war" at home.

GP: Well, of course, even if only initially by osmosis, Himes, Goines, Cooper, et al. had an influence on me. Just the fact that they produced work and got a reaction in the marketplace of ideas is gonna rub off on you because you come into contact with those who’ve read their works. So, once I got to read their stuff, it couldn’t help but broaden my way of thinking about what I write. That is, writing out of your own experiences and weaving that through your work, as well as the style and the approach of what and how you write. Other writers who have influenced me at various points have been Rod Serling, Ralph Ellison (his collection of stories, Shadow and Act, is great), Ross MacDonald, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Wright, Lester Dent (he wrote the Doc Savage pulp novels and some detective yarns), bell hooks, Stan Lee (the Marvel comics innovator), and Jimi Hendrix, Curtis Mayfield, Warren Zevon and Springsteen on the lyrics end.

PM: Music definitely has an important place in your work. It seems that there’s a real connection between the musician and the detective when it comes to "giving voice to those who have none." I’m thinking of lots of people - Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Miles Davis, Monk (obviously), Dexter Gordon -- on through to Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone....shit, Curtis Mayfield. What a shame about his death, eh? What’re you listening to these days? 

GP: Oh man, you’re right, Curtis was just one hell of a musician and writer. I have a pretty eclectic musical bent. As I mentioned, Only The Wicked has a music sub-plot that deals with the mythical lost album of Delta Blues great Charlie Patton. I like the Blues - Patton, Big Mama Thornton, Son House, John Lee Hooker (his "Burning Hell" is the bomb), Muddy Waters, James Harmon, and so on, Jazz -- Miles, Monk, Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, Joshua Redman, Terence Blanchard, Jimmy Smith, Jimmy Scott, etc., etc. Some kind of jazz riffs are always playing in my head when I write a detective or crime story. I dig some rap --check out Prince Paul’s "A Prince among Thieves" album which chronicles the rise and fall of a young hustlah. I also like The Fugees, who I guess will only have the one album, "The Score," Nat King Cole, Dean Martin (one of these days I’m gonna do this hepster 50’s cat in San Francisco who gets involved in some kind of scheme based on these two), Led Zeppelin, Carla Thomas, and on and on.

PM: I really admire your story, "Stone Cold Killah." Can you tell me a little bit about what inspired you to write it (I’m sure the shooting of Notorious B.I.G. had something to do with it). You treat rap in a very even-handed and sane way: you extol the form’s virtues but you’re not about to let some of the gangsta rappers off of the hook for glorifying violence, misogyny, etc. Can you expand a little on that? Did you get any flack from the black community for that story?

GP: I don’t think anybody in the black community per se read "Stone Cold Killah" ‘cause of where it ran [UK anthology Blue Lightning]. I suppose had it originally been in an American anthology, maybe there would have been more chance for a reaction, or maybe not. I’ve certainly read pieces in rap/hip-hop publications that cast a critical eye on the art form, and Nelson George in his book chronicling the history of rap writes eloquently about its pluses and minuses. Which reminds me - on the musical front, I have to mention political rapper Paris’ "Guerilla Funk" and Rage Against the Machine’s slammin’ "The Battle of Los Angeles" as the cream of the form. The story for "Stone Cold Killah" had been running around in my mind for awhile - Chris Wallace, aka Notorious B.I.G. was shot down at the Peterson Automotive Museum about a mile from my home after a record release party. I’d been thinking about doing a take on the rap world, so when John Harvey asked me to contribute to his music-themed anthology, the timing was perfect. The business of glorifying violence and misogyny can also be leveled at us mystery writers, so I’m careful about the stones I throw -- ‘cause my glass house is shaky, baby.

PM: I think The Jook is the best book you’ve published so far. It’s such a classic noir tale and its antecedents can be found in Cain, Thompson, etc. Zelmont Raines [has-been football star] is a doomed figure because his own pride drives him straight down. He can’t handle the reality that he was once on top and will never be up there again. He sees himself getting older and watches the younger guys stepping up and taking his place in the spotlight. He’s an ambiguous character because in some ways we like him and empathize with him, yet at the same time he’s a shallow prick. Can you elaborate on what you were shooting for in this book? Did the inspiration for Raines come from any particular athlete’s fall from grace?

GP: Bless you for your kind thoughts on The Jook. As to Zelmont’s antecedents, the previous antics of guys like wide receiver Michael Irvin on the Cowboys, and, years earlier on that same team, linebacker Hollywood Henderson. The litany of guys who had it all, been given it all - money, women, fame - without proper preparation (perhaps from guys who had been there and learned from their mistakes) as to how to put these kind of things in perspective. Yeah, all that was in the mix in coming up with The Jook. I mean, Mickey Mantle’s career was cut short because of his boozing, so it’s not just a phenomena with black athletes, but it’s particularly heightened when a black athlete fucks up ‘cause, like it or not, the spotlight’s gonna be on him because the media is looking for him to slip. They’re looking for anyone’s feet of clay, but take some trash talkin’, struttin’ brother with a blonde or two on his arm, and, well, there you have it. But The Jook is no morality tale, as you said, it’s a classic noir structure, so I leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions from the book. I will say this - in the real world, Charles Barkley was wrong. The athlete, particularly the black or Latino athlete, like it or not, is a role model, and has to at least be aware of what that entails."

PM: After reading your books back to back I’ve noticed how much stronger and tighter the writing’s become with each successive book. Can you tell me a little bit about your writing process? I remember reading an interview Martin Amis conducted with Elmore Leonard. They each said something I thought was interesting: Amis said that when he was rewriting he looked for the "elbows" sticking out of his sentences. Leonard said that he "tried to leave out the parts that people skim." With The Jook, you’ve honed it down so tight. I love the whole tone of the book and appreciated the fact that you didn’t make any concessions (esp in the dialogue) for slow readers. It was either keep up or get lost.

GP: "Yeah, writing The Jook was liberating in terms of working terse and tight. While doing the book, I realized why it was that Thompson’s and Goodis’ stuff was always being filmed, ‘cause they’d pared the words down so the story just moved. It has made me think, as I ruminate on the next Monk book, how to apply some of that approach. Realizing that Monk is third person, and I do shift perspectives now and then and do deal with more complex situations. But yeah, the more I can get it down and clean, without being boring or Dragnet-style, I’m more conscious of trying to achieve that."

PM: I know you have a lot of projects coming up. What’s next?

GP: I’ve turned in the second Chainey book, Shooter’s Point to Kensington. Chainey is a former showgirl who is now a courier for the corporate mob that runs modern Vegas. Tyson is a novella about the unsavory world of pit bull fighting I did for a company called [S]Affiliated. The idea is that the book will be packaged with its own CD soundtrack - the combined packaging to only be sold through record chains and bookstores. And Shot Callerz, a four-part comic book is on tap for Oni Comics with great art by Jim Mahfood.

PM: What about Monk?

GP: I’m hoping to sell the next one in the series, Angelville. I’ve done the outline and I think readers will enjoy the mystery and the changes that occur with some of the major characters.

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